 What is water? You know we have been talking about water. When you think about water, what comes in your head? Something like this, you know, something that is just made through earth, isn't it? And that flows in the rivers, through the rivers. But if you think about tropical rivers, it's not just water that flows through those rivers. It's also a silt. Sometimes up to 30% of what goes on through the rivers is actually silt. And that is the silt that goes into building the deltas. So if you think of deltas, large deltas in the tropical areas, the leading experts, you have to think of the leading expert who is the top leading expert in the world about deltas. And here is Rohan Vizuza, who is going to talk about water insecurity today, but he is the leading expert in the world about deltas. He has written the history of deltas in eastern India from 1750 to 1950. So here is Rohan. All right. I must say I have to start with a correction, Kuntala, despite the generous praise. The title of my dissertation, PhD submitted in 1998, was Floods in Eastern India, 1750 to 1950, yes. Which is why I always introduce myself as the world's leading expert on floods in eastern India from 1750 to 1950. So I think I should have a mild corrective there. And not a day beyond 1750. All right. I know you've had a hard day and I'm going to repeat what Kuntala said. And sometimes, you know, the presentations have been incredibly exciting. And I say this not because I'm being patronizing, but I truly enjoyed all the presentations I attended. And I truly learned a lot. And I know that adding one more drop is going to now be an overflow. So the strategy, because I'm between a hard rock and another hard rock because after this is drinks, right? Okay, right. Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to adopt what is called the cold bath approach. That is, by the time you're in it, you're already thinking of how to leave. Yeah. All right. So this is on water insecurity and security in South Asia. And really, this topic came to me because of a very strange set of conversations that I was having with this friend of mine who's a Zen Buddhist. And he once told me, he said, okay, you want to work on water. Let me give you a Zen Kwan. The Zen Kwan would be something like this. How do you see like a bird and think like a fish, right? So that's the, and there's, of course, much with Zen Kwan's, there's no explanation beyond that. But seeing like a bird is, of course, about patterns from the sky, large ways of looking at geographical patterns. And seeing like a fish is, of course, being sensitive to really the micro level at which the fish has to operate. So if you can put them together, it's quite possible that you could write a paper on security. And I'm trying to see that if that's possible today. All right. Let me, oh, do I, okay. The big deep water dilemmas. And this is something I'm just rehearsing in its most elemental and primitive quote unquote forms. What are we really thinking about and writing against? And what do we seem to be doing? One is there's an entire traditional scholarship that we are challenging. And it's about 150 years old. And it's got five points that I think helps you summarize the whole thing. Very Zen like, sorry for that. One is the belief that water has no history. It's an inert substance. It's life giving, but no life of its own. And lastly, technologies for manipulating water are apolitical and neutral. This is really the 19th century, 20th century way in which if you were the engineering vision of how water should be reflected on as dead inert and something that you deal with apolitically and historically neutral. Right. Now this is what is really the art of what is being challenged in many of the proceedings and many of the submissions, including today. And most of it is done by the hydraulic turn, so to speak. We're talking about, I think, perhaps the late 70s and early 80s where you take water and you begin to put it in context of meanings, values and potentials that are socially conferred. Again, I make no claim to being original about this. What I'm trying to basically put together is a large body of writing and thinking on the subject. And if you were to break that down, what you're seeing people doing is they would take the notion of water as lacking history or water being inert and put that into a context of meaning. And then you get something completely different, which is finally you begin to see the elephant in the pool. Right. So much of that turning about meanings and values brings us to asking this question in a in a fundamental. It's not the only question, but I would say one of the most great in questions that can be presented is in the form of what is called the social hydro political dialectic. That is, the more we talk about water, the more we tend to talk about ourselves. It's like water almost becomes a mirror into our into the way we we look pleasant, unpleasant, whatever the question may be. I use the word hydraulic paradigm, but I think after today's presentations, I've gone a little bit soft in it. I think maybe I should just abandon it and basically argue that if we are to understand how water is manipulated, can we in some ways then begin to characterize the way we are? Can we find a pattern? That is, if we talk, we put it this way, there was a lovely presentation today about the flush toilet. Yeah, if we talk about a society committed to flush toilet, does that society then become something open to a description in a unique and distinct way? Is it possible to argue that a flush toilet is possible in an urban regime with a strong sense of individual individualizing power? Yeah, right, that it is a flush toilet is very connected to constructing us as individuals rather than as people of community and a solidarity that is about I must recollect Professor Isha Shah from Berkeley who when she had to do fieldwork on irrigation. She found that one of the things she had to do was to communally share, how does one put it without sounding difficult? Well, people would basically shit together, right? And so she had to sit with them and they would exchange stories and discuss and talk, right? So obviously a flush toilet in that context would involve a dramatic alteration of personality type in order to be applicable to put it mildly. So what I'm arguing here is that when we talk about water insecurity or security, are we talking about a new moment of politics and the societies that we try to characterize? Which is what I'm trying to do. Okay, a detour. This is of course what South Asia looks like with strangely enough only India looking like it's South Asia, but I should have got another map. But what I'm trying to argue here or show visually is that part of the template of insecurity and security is today being driven by what is understood to be a problem or a complication that of trans boundary river systems. Yeah, so it would be something like you could see from the north, India shares boundaries, rivers with Pakistan, Pakistan of course shares rivers with India and Bangladesh and so on and so forth. What increasingly is becoming the case is that they're finding that land and property fits neatly into political territory and political boundaries. But rivers tend to be promiscuous. There is absolutely no loyalty. They flow across political boundaries and they somehow unsettle the stability of land, which is a problem. They don't appreciate hard fought one notions of sovereignty. Right. So what do you do for these kinds of digressions? You frame them now as problems of security. And I'll come back to that later. But before I do that, let me rehearse very quickly certain templates by which water manipulation is characterized as a social sense. What I what I'm trying to explain by that is that they have been writings in the recent past where they're trying to understand. How do you characterize the way water is manipulated and used in say the modern moment in Asia? All right. And one of the first notions that we have that tries to stabilize it as a concept is called the hydraulic mission. So if you want to look at the modern moment to explain the way water is manipulated, harnessed, used, abused and so on and so forth. The term is the hydraulic mission and its characteristics are the following. Number one, it believes in giant hydraulic infrastructure, large dams, wires, diversion structures and so on and so forth. So there's an emphasis on giant, giantness and bigness and centralized states. The second point that they want to use to characterize it, and this is Peter Mullinger and Francois Moll, they use it. It's called the iron triangle syndrome as well. They want to say that bureaucrats, politicians and contractors have all come together to control, formulate and define the hydraulic mission. So if you really want to understand contemporary manipulative, contemporary practices for manipulating and controlling water, you must need to understand the iron triangle, right? And the iron triangle then opens up a mirror onto itself when it looks at water. And so they make this correlation between water technologies, political imperatives and profits. So this is the way the hydraulic mission is framed. However, there are differences and there's someone called Jay Allen who writes that actually that's too simple. There's much more complexity within the hydraulic mission. And so he says we have to put it in five stages. Stage one, we have to understand the pre-modern community which is low primitive technology and simple community organization, right? So you don't get really the bigness of technology for water manipulation. And then you get the industrial revolution that then breeds this whole set of possibilities that never existed before. And this continues according to Jay Allen sometime till the 1970s when there is a reflection on what he calls environmental flows. He says the hydraulic mission now begins to consider or insert the idea of the environmental flow and therefore it looks different. By the 1990s, he's talking about water as economic value, right? That is, there's a transition to understanding water as an economic good. And so you get environmental flows, economic good, you get industrial revolution and pre-modern community. And they're all adding up by 2000 to the idea of integrated water resource management, which I'm sure everyone has heard. But for Allen, what it means is the finally the recognition of politics as a crucial way of understanding water. So in his opinion, the hydraulic mission evolves in a linear fashion and arrives finally at the P word politics. So if you want to understand water management today, you need an engagement with politics. Now there are some who argue that this is not enough, that this is really shades that basically explain the same thing. And politics undoubtedly is about inclusion and exclusion. But if we were to talk about inclusion without questioning the fundamental say of large dams or of big technologies, would that be all right? One of the things about IWRM is the belief that we're not fundamentally against large dams, we just want good dams. And there's a basis for making that claim. So there is another argument, some of which of course I'm also keen to advocate. The belief that actually the modern moment is really about a new philosophical disposition towards the way we handle water. And that philosophical disposition has this very simple but profound belief that water can simply be physically transferred to constituencies that need it. What that roughly means is that water has no ecology or history or place. It can be moved around and shuffled around. So whether it's large dams, whether it's diversions, whether it's wise, the belief is that you can make water go to wherever you want it to go. And the supply side hydrology assemblage has been painfully somewhat in twists and turns being constructed over 150 years. And the four elements that are crucial to it, that in fact define and colour the way we tend to respond to the challenge of water, is the civil engineering vision, which of course Margaret has so beautifully and wonderfully got across today. Quantitative hydrology, that is, water can actually be broken down into numbers and be understood as volumes, right? High modernist social planning, the TVA, many of the projects of the 1930s and onwards. And I'm thinking of Richard White's organic machine, that great book that says, and tells us how the Columbia project comes up as a way of formulating a new vision of society itself. For someone, for something that Gathri, what Peter Gathri is it? What is it? A musician? Woody Gathri, sorry. Woody Gathri, who sings about, you know, as a way of socialism, right? And lastly, of course, it breeds the giant centralized national water bureaucracy. Now all these elements, not only interlock but share the philosophical premise that water has no ecology or place or history, yeah? So whenever you get attempts to put this back in, you actually get and generate a kind of politics. That is my claim. And that politics does happen. I mean, if you could open up a lot of the politics around water management or for that matter, non-management in South Asia today, what you're seeing is claims for place, claims for ecology and kind of a context for arguing that water has a history, right? So I'm trying to rehearse three moods, which I think summarize much of the literature that's really post 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. There's a lot of it and I won't individually flag all these authors because, you know, drinks are waiting at the end. All right. Okay. The first, the first mood I refer to as the reflexive challenge. This is the belief that there's a managerial and technical interventions that actually need to be fleshed out. That is, you need to really empower certain institutional mechanisms like water tribunals, independent commissions and river basin authorities. The belief in the rule of the expert really. So what they would argue is that science must humiliate politics and that politics basically must be kept out of good science because politics is always trying to use good science. So the managers, the technocrats come in and say, okay, this is how we think it should be done. And if you listen to us, things will be better. And they believe in rationally bargaining and efficiency sharing frameworks. So this is the real mood about the solution to many of the problems as they see it. But I must also admit that a lot of this literature should be faulted for the one unforgivable act. Terribly boring. Yeah. Okay. So then there is the second mood, which I refer to as resistance modes with Zoe corrected as resistant mode, but I'm going to hold on to it for the time being. Much of this literature starts off by saying, okay, there's a gap between claims and actual results on the ground. So the whole idea is to really write and challenge and to question projects by saying, this is what you're saying. This is what is actually going to happen. So close the gap. And this kind of literature then argues for environmental, technical and social qualifications. So they would argue that we need a more adept EIA. We need a more greater sensitivity to actual local participation in making these decisions, et cetera, et cetera. So the whole idea is to basically argue that benign outcomes are possible with the given technologies provided you listen to people. And of course, part of this narrative falls what they refer to as the contractor politician bureaucratic nexus or something like the iron triangle, right? So the narrative, if one was to write it as a movie, would be the bad guys, contractors, politicians, bureaucratic nexus, the good guys, maybe community participants and so on and so forth. And while in Bollywood films there's a dance in the middle that is the EIA and other technical qualifications that come in, right? Now, the third mood, which I'm far more sort of supportive of is literature and writings that go beyond discussing unfulfilled promises. That really large dams and good dams is really not about an unfulfilled promise. That we have to understand this water manipulation strategy as really fundamentally being about the way power is constructed in society. There are certain choices, certain ways in which water is harnessed tells us a lot about how dominant structures within that society want to basically remain at the top. So for those who critique as radical critiques, every project is about how a certain arrangement of power tries to stabilize itself. And one has to understand that because you want a different political imagination, a different possibility, right? Not necessarily an adjustment or compromise. An adjustment and compromise is part of perhaps a larger different political imagination. So it opens the window into really putting forward the belief that alternative different imaginations must be presented in order to rethink the water question, yeah? And so, for example, on the question of large dams, it's not about unfulfilled promises, but as Arundhati Roy very beautifully and aptly sort of sums it up, that it's really about the transfer of resources. How much can you really qualify environmentally and technically given that intended outcome, right? So this is the kind of literatures that one can review that has been written in South Asia. But none of this actually touches on what I argue is the new term towards securitization. And a brief note on that before I go to the next slide. Securitization discourse is something that comes up in the 1990s. It's called the Copenhagen School, Barry Duzan, Oli Weaver, and Japty Wilde. I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation of the last name, where they argue that actually security is not an objective condition. It can be talked up through speech acts and securitization discourse really argues that they say it's non-traditional forms of discourse, security discourse can be created by the way people actually talk up anything, right? So food security, agriculture security or river or water security for that matter. It has to be talked up in such a powerful fashion that there's a consensus that then can be emerged or stabilized, right? Through what they call security moves. I won't get into that too much. But I would argue today that in South Asia two particular recent publications are indicative of that trend. The first in India by an organization called the Indian Institute of Defence Study and Analysis. It's a government security think tank. And the IDSA brought out a report in 2010, which was titled the relevance of water in the larger national security context. 2010, very simple, straightforward. And what they argue in that is that hydro diplomacy now is going to be crucial to the way that India has to relate to its river systems, particularly keeping in mind the fact that China could be damning the Bramputra and various other scenarios are worked out. It's quite alarmist, but it's also very measured. And what they argue at one fundamental level is that what we have to think about is data and how it's secured. And if at all people are going to construct stuff so they're not fundamentally against big centralized technology being constructed, then we'll talk about sharing, river sharing, all right? So this is the kind of strategies that they want to adopt. In 2011, the Committee of Foreign Relations from the US brought out another report called avoiding water wars. It's not like water wars are not happening, avoiding water wars. So there's a clear sense of creating and sustaining what the Copenhagen School would say, speech acts to talk up the idea of security, right? And these are the characteristics of most of what they argue and I mean it's very much visible in the documents. One is the objective notions of scarcity, demography and geopolitics, okay? These are presented as givens. These are not constructed. So demography is this is India's numbers. This is Pakistan's numbers and so on and so forth. So you get too many people, too little water, too little land and so therefore war breaks out, yeah? So that's one way in which it's dreamed out. Secondly, there's an emphasis or call for increased centralization, enforced secrecy, selective data and statistics, which then are defined as national interests and this is anecdotal, but many of my friends who always try to get data on rivers, volumetric data so to speak, so obviously I mean it's always very, very difficult. You're not completely convinced that it's correct data or for that matter some of it is just say national security interests so you don't have access to it. So therefore the third aspect of the securitization move is limiting public access, access while empowering narrow bands of experts and institutions. What you're getting now is a reversal of all the gains earlier so-called made through meanings and values that we've all so carefully crafted as a way of talking about water. Increasingly what the securitization discourse wants to do is to argue that what Agamben would put, that state of exception, that emergency prevents us from giving you access to river data or for that matter if you're going to construct something under national interest then it does not have to respond to the protocols of democracy. So what I see is even though the three moods that I pointed out earlier, reflexive, resistance and radical in a strange way whether it's market or states they had some premises that one could say was about challenging centralized water management. They spoke for public access to information. They wanted transparency. They made claims about water as being something fundamental to a democratic imagination. But here you get a complete reversal in the way that this securitization discourse is being assembled. Now, this is the last slide. I could not think of a better way of summarizing the dilemma. I'm sure you're familiar with Edward Monk's very iconic portraits, the screen. And I was reading a bit on this and it's very striking. This is 1893 and Monk is taking a walk and then he was overwhelmed and in his words by a night sky or late evening sky in which the sky was blood red with tons of fire and then he felt this painful scream coming out of nature itself. What is striking about the picture is that the figure actually doesn't scream. It's nature itself that screams. The figure is actually choked by a scream of dream time. It's one of those where you're on dream time and you lose the ability to scream. So in a certain sense, if you look at the securitization discourse, the scream comes from nature. And you are denied that voice to scream. That's the way it is operationalized. In a certain sense, desecuritizing is putting the scream back into the figure, the way I see it. And that means, of course, many more micro narratives and many more ways in which you put in history, ecology and context into the way we discuss water, right? Because I think the objective of security studies today is to create a fluvial anxiety with Kierkegaard often says anxiety is basically unfocused fear. So to bring that sensibility into the way we talk about water is what security discourse tries to do. And I would urge you to consider that today the triumph of security discourse is to become very elemental. It's not at the rational sphere. It's not even at the cultural sphere. It's really at that elemental fear of anxiety, fear, distress, and of course the scream, right? So I should end on that. I know you'd be screaming to leave the room and get to the drinks. So I thought maybe this would be the most appropriate way. Thank you so much for your patience. Yes, I really appreciated your particular, your last slide and reminded me of a meeting on, I was sitting here in A&E with some senior professors talking about water. And there was one expert and thankfully he has left A&E now. But he was talking about, well, you know what we need to do is press the security button. And I was, oh my God, how much more I have to tolerate. And people keep doing that. I mean, Ramachandran, oh goodness, just about how this China is upon us. And one of the reasons why South Asia is full of countries who can't tolerate each other. And this whole idea of security. Yeah, thank you for that. I'll open the, now that I have set my keys, I want to open the floor for questions. Yes, Louis? It's just a little question just about the last piece of your paper there. Right. Right, are you saying that we should actually be cultivating a more focused fear? In terms of when you're saying to bring back the things that have been absent, like the ecology of Australia. Right, right. Well, I'd say that, well, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm just personally reading Kierkegaard a few months ago and I was struck by how he discusses the notion of anxiety. You know, it doesn't necessarily come from anywhere in particular. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, the angst. Yeah, yeah. And much of the security discourse, actually when they unfocus that fear, it paralyzes your capacity to analyze and to understand exactly what is the basis of their anxiety. Right. So to, in a strange way, if one was to acquire a sense of focus, then one opens up the basis for an analysis. Yeah. Which is not to say that because you know what the problem is, it goes away. Which is to say that your reactions might be more based on better judgment. Yeah. But I say this also because, you know, there's now enough security literature that's coming out in Brahmachalini's book, which of course is just, I mean, there are parts of it which I don't know how exactly to, I mean, it should have this on the cover, actually, with Brahmachalini's name written just below that. But he writes, for example, oh, Pakistan is all jihadist and it's got a huge population problem and India should really, I mean, this is about 1.2 billion worrying about another million here on the other side. Yeah. So not to show off necessarily, but yeah. So but I'm just saying how this is all done to, it's a psychological warfare which breeds anxiety. Right. And so I'm wondering that much as the turn towards meaning and values and context has been really helpful in unsettling the civil engineering view of water. The security discourse will open up a very different realm of challenges. And partly, you know, if you look at some of the ways climate change is framed, the unknown. So we all should worry. Yeah. I think that will require us to embrace a very different sense of analysis and a sensibility about politics as well. Yeah. So this is like, you know, this is the belief that this template is being assembled. It's not yet something that's walking. Right. But you can already smell it in the air, so to speak. Yeah. We were sort of identifying different ages of the water, hydrologics kind of thing. And we got to, you know, the future of a sort of happy hippie co-management sort of, you know, being involved in the time. But the latest version of this model that they've come up with, and this phase is running synchronously. Right. So we, with the security discourse, and they're talking in the Australian context as well. So we've got a double vision now. We've got this sort of trend, like we thought we were getting away from big water and models of co-managements coming up, you know, which is the theme of this conference. But, you know, on top of that or alongside it, we're getting this securitisation discourse, which is really going back to a big water kind of thing. Right. Right. Yeah. And I mean, one should really worry. The last James Bond film, not Skywalk, but the one before that, I think Daniel Craig's first film, was about water. What was it? The Solace. Yeah, Solace, yeah. So this guy who buys up all this land in Bolivia, that on the surface looks like completely relevant stuff. I mean, can't grow anything, but there's water underneath, right? And of course, Bond saves the world and so on and so forth. That's a different story. What I'm saying is, there's already a sense of turning water into a source of anxiety and unfocused fear. We're ready to continue. In Mercher's painting, doesn't he maintain a dualism between humans and nature? And isn't that part of the problem, too? If you were to frame it as we are unfocused in our fear in nature, or our relational dynamics with nature, then I can begin to appreciate the argument. But what's happened with the IPCC, for example, is that they have unwittingly cultivated a global emotion of fear. Right. Well, I hate all repertoire globally has gone down in the last couple of years rather than going up. Yeah. So we need to transfer, if we have to change in any way that could be seen as transformative or positive, then we need to generate an emotion of hope. Yeah, right. Well, you know, Arjun Apadurai has another phrase which I kind of liked. It's there in the paper. I completely forgot to get it across here. It says, the politics of patience against the politics of emergency. And the politics of patience is about deepening democracy through dialogue, negotiations, adjustments, compromises, ideas that go back and forth. And you have to cultivate that, yeah, in order to prevent this, the politics of emergency, which is what security studies tries to do. Is that the fusing of the market value and of democracy is a particular approach to work management. But if you look at the terror campaigns, particularly with the notion of the state of perception, that the vote suspends more and more processes, how then would you see the market dynamic playing out because it's strongly aligned to the democratic ideal in the order space. So does that mean we necessarily suspend market forces or are you saying that it's purely a democratic model, the human rights model? Can I sort of answer this in a roundabout way? Well, you have no choice. I'm going to do it anyway. You know, there's a lovely essay by Keith Tribe in the journal Economic Economy and Society, and I forget the date and the page numbers, of course, where he argues that actually perhaps we've misunderstood Foucault's notion of governmentality, where he argues actually what Foucault was trying to understand was how government was beginning to acquire the calculation of the market. So he says that governmentality was not about the state beginning to present itself as a bureaucratic monolith in which people are disciplined through institutions like the prison, the family and the state, but actually acquiring the calculations of the market. And so even public institutions today account in market calculations way. So in a certain sense, then they need not really be a divergence between the state and the market in the classical sense that we understand, but how the state can actually pick up these tricks or calculations, so to speak, and then begin to enforce them without the process of democracy. And this is something that's been flagged by Zizek. I mean, not that one would agree necessarily with him, but he says the difference between Western democracies and the new Western capitalism and the new emerging capitalism in Asia. He says the Asian capitalism is not going to go through the history of democracy that the Western world went through. I mean, debatable, questionable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a point in arguing that there is going to be perhaps a version of capitalism that doesn't really need the space of civil society anymore. I'm sorry, I'm not intending to be very dark here, but I'm trying to say that there are incredibly revealing signs that one mustn't quite ignore. One is often asked, are you hopeful? It's a bad question in my opinion. You need to really know the context in which this question is being asked. Or is it possible, Rohan, that it doesn't really need the civil society, but it does engage or pretend to be engaging with the civil society in a different guard, like public private partnerships and all that sort of thing, just to keep it happy. But you know, having said that, again, I don't want to throw a big name here, but I was recently struck. Nietzsche, in his wonderful book, Fensic Nietzsche, did I pronounce it wrong? Okay, maybe I did. In his book, Good and Evil, he writes at one level, he says, all morality in some way does violence against nature and, does tyranny against nature and reason. And he says that by itself is not objectionable. What one must understand is that it can't be done unless you have an alternative morality that actually will not accept tyranny or unreasonable. So unless we have a different vision of how we critique capital, it's really a story about corruption and crime only. Yeah, that's a wonderful observation room. On that note, shall we wind up with it? Can you have another question? I just came here to submit that. It just doesn't match the way they can always talk to people. Yeah, sure. Right, right, right. Yes, they have. All right. Oh, thank you. So I don't have to say my name. It's not too bad.